Writing a Memoir, Writing a Biography | Write Your Memoir

I used to think memoir consists of three things: (1) writing, (2) in the first person, (3) about a thin slice of a person’s life. “The reader doesn’t want the whole iceberg, just the tip,” to paraphrase Russell Baker.

Now I realize memoir is much broader. First of all, you have a lot of other objectives–besides the act of writing itself–when you create memoirs. You want to: 

• record family stories
• research family history
• find lost relatives
• socialize with lost relatives once you've found them
• discover your DNA
• collect and preserve family data
• get over something traumatic
• tell the story behind a family memento
• create personal documents (video, audio, shadow boxes, etc.)
• get rid of something heavy which you've been carrying around (secret, imposition, demand)
• catalogue, organize, and archive family documents, photos, and memorabilia
• take the sting out of something painful
• save and identify family heirlooms
• capture family information that would otherwise be lost.

I now have a working definition of memoir which is much more broad. Memoir is the communication of what you want to remember and what you want to be remembered. Which leads me to two more points. First, you can get really creative and use any of the following as the basis of a memoir:  

• letters you quote
• recipes
• random memories
• your hopes for the future
• a secret you no longer want to keep
• family sayings
• something that always got on your last nerve
• a mystery you never figured out
• funny family anecdotes
• what you want your legacy to be
• describing what’s going on in an iconic family photo
• a list of your favorite things and why
• describing how you got around a long time ago
• how a business used to make money
• your worst vacation
• how you kept the house cool in the summer
• the most expensive thing you ever bought
• a portrait of a relative using your five senses (see, hear, feel, taste, smell).

Second point. You don’t have to write at all. Lots of your "stuff" can be turned into a memoir:    

• Photographs
• Video
• Audio
• What things cost
• Collages
• Political buttons and pins
• Jewelry
• Fabrics
• A telephone bill
• “Shrines” you create
• Scrapbooks
• Songs
• Guns
• Music
• Portraits
• Paintings
• Statues
• Pottery
• Drawings
• Furniture
• Clothing
• Games
• Puzzles
• Tools
• Maps
• Drawings
• Self-portraits

Even a packing list from 50 years ago could be the basis for a great memoir. So, I ask you:

• What do you want to remember?
• What do you want others to remember?

Tell me about the memoir you create. Send me a photo.

Abraham Verghese recommended in yesterday’s Five Best in The Wall Street Journal five of his favorite books by physicians, including two memoirs. Adventures in Two Worlds is A. J. Cronin’s memoir about being a young physician in a Welsh mining town. The Puzzle People by Thomas E. Starzl is the memoir of the pioneer transplantation surgeon.

I once found a photo tucked inside a book at an estate sale. The photo showed a Model T in ruins, destroyed by what looked like a head-on collision. The photo jumped out at me. I took it the man, about my age, who was running the garage sale. His mother had just died and he was selling the contents of her house. I handed him the photo. “This looks important,” I said.

He stood transfixed, staring at the photo. “Mother told us about that crash. Both she and Dad survived it. But I never knew if the story was true.”

My mother-in-law, Maxine (Shanbar) Marshall, has an iconic memoir photo. Her photo shows an apartment building (not hers) being moved from its location near Poplar Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The reason? The construction of The Mystic River Bridge (now the Tobin Memorial Bridge).

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Why not make your memoir writing easier? Why not organize it around an iconic photo?

An email about Lilly Friedman’s parachute wedding dress is making the rounds again. The email is un-credited, or I would attribute the source, but I can confirm that Lilly Friedman’s wedding dress is for real and is exhibited at The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Over 60 years ago, Lilly (Lax) Friedman was a DP (displaced person) in Bergen Belsen Displaced Person’s camp. Lilly had survived Auschwitz, a forced labor camp, a death march, and Bergen Belsen itself. In 1946, when Lilly Lax and Ludwig Friedman decided to marry, Ludwig bartered two pounds of coffee beans and a couple of packs of cigarettes for a German parachute. With the help of a seamstress, Lilly created the white wedding gown she was determined to have when she and Ludwig stood under the chuppah (wedding canopy). Many other DP brides borrowed Lilly’s dress. How many? “I stopped counting after 17,” says Lilly. For these women, the dress symbolized a return to normalcy after the Holocaust. Lilly’s father and her two brothers were exterminated immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. Lilly and two sisters survived and live near each other now in Brooklyn, NY.

As a friend of mine said, “Amazing that she kept the dress.” That’s something I would have done. I still have the kippah (yarmulke) from the first bar mitzvah I ever went to. Do you have a beloved object you’ve kept all these years because of what it means to you? Perhaps an item of clothing, a watch, a medal, or a souvenir? Why not write a memoir about it? Write down “who, what, when, where, why, and how.” Where did you get it? Who made it? What does it mean to you? Tell its story. Lilly’s parachute wedding dress is a great example of an object with a story to tell. What is your parachute wedding dress?

My parachute wedding dress is an apron that belonged to my paternal great-great grandmother, Martha Anne (Moore) Gott (born 12-25-1834 died 3-9-1917, age 82). A few years ago, I was given Martha’s apron on a family visit to the Gotts in Montrose, Colorado (my late father’s cousin, the late Max Gott, and wife, Darlene Gott). Darlene gave it to me and said, “Her name was Martha. You should have this.”

I want to preserve the apron and possible display it, but don’t know how. Any ideas? Let me know.

Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, died over the weekend. Our friend, Robert Siegel, M.D., studied English with McCourt in a New York City public high school. I remember Robert saying McCourt was supportive, engaging, and fun. As a teacher, he spent time to give a little extra to his students, took them out, got to know them. As Hillel Italie said of Angela’s Ashes in today’s AP obituary, the 1996 book was “perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir.” But underneath its Irish charm,  Angela’s Ashes was an expression of defiance. ”I refused to settle for a one-act existence,” said McCourt. He set out to write about his past, but would not let himself be bound by it. He went on–after 30 years of teaching–to describe his childhood in a book that has been published in 25 languages, in 30 countries, selling millions of copies, winning the Pulitzer Prize. Angela’s Ashes was the beginning of a long and successful second act. An ordinary man, an extraordinary memoir.

My passion is helping everyday people write their personal memoirs. I expect most of these memoirs will be self-published, distributed to family and friends. Unfortunately, times have changed since McCourt published Angela’s Ashes and unless you’re a celebrity, you probably won’t get your memoir published by a commercial publisher. (That’s what so great about all the print-on-demand, self-publishing options, which I will write more about in subsequent blogs).

Frank McCourt taught us that we are all ordinary. But our memoirs can be extraordinary. If you  limit the scope of your memoir to a small topic (e.g., dad’s hearing aids), if you write honestly (it made you mad when he turned them off during fights with your mother), and if you include descriptions of concrete details (his hearing aids used to have a wire going over his head like a headband), your memoir can make the ordinary extraordinary. That’s because no one perceives the world exactly as you do.

Here’s to ordinary people writing extraordinary memoirs. And to saying “no” to a one-act existence. Do you think your memoir will be an act of defiance? Let me know.

I recently attended a lecture at my public library on “Genetic Genealogy,” presented by Blaine T. Bettinger, Ph.D. Genetic genealogy analyzes your ancestral DNA, based on cells you collect from a mouth swab. You send the swab in to a lab and the lab tells you your genetic genealogy going back hundreds, possibly even 1,000 years ago. I thought genetic DNA analysis costs thousands of dollars. No. Only a few hundred. It also doesn’t reveal anything about your medical genetics for people who are concerned about that.

Although there is more than one DNA lab, Dr. Bettinger (www.thegeneticgenealogist.com) recommends www.familytreeDNA.com because it has the largest database–one-half million people have been tested using it. (The larger the database, the easier to find a match to your DNA ancestry.) Women test only the “female DNA,” or mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), which is passed down from their mothers. Men can test both the mtDNA from their mothers, and the “surname DNA,” or male DYA (YDNA) from their fathers.

Who knew that 90% of Europeans are descended from seven women, known as the seven daughters of Eve? Check out The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes (W. W. Norton, 2001 hardcover, 2002 trade paperback). According to Nielsen Bookscan, the book has sold 100,000 copies in hardcover and paperback combined.

Have you had your DNA analyzed? Do you know where your ancient ancestors came from?  Who said we can’t time travel?